Tag: plant collecting

A redemptive bus ride to the supermarket

This campsite in Pembrokeshire has the huge advantage of being about a quarter of a mile from a bus stop that’s part of a circular route around the local coastline. It’s called the Celtic Coaster and for £4 you can buy a day ticket that allows you to get on and off as many times as you like and at any of the stops. It’s ideal for walking and also ideal for shopping in St Davids because it runs every half an hour so if you get your skates on you can catch the bus to the centre, do a lively run around the shops and be back on the City Hall bus stop in time to catch the same bus back to the campsite. The lanes here are really narrow and often congested and parking in St Davids is as far from the shops as we are from the bus stop so it’s an environmental no-brainer to leave the campervan behind. Another plus is that the drivers are so cheerful and obliging that we usually get dropped off at the campsite entrance and yesterday we were such a merry bunch of passengers I thought we might even start singing. To be honest, the thought of that kind of atmosphere on one of our local city buses is a faraway dream; but a sense of community, shared values and belonging will have to be a part of any emergent culture to replace the hostile and suspicious communities of one that constitute the smouldering remains of culture wars.

But aside from that little redemptive challenge to the status quo, there was something else on my mind as we cut through Gospel Lane and down New Street towards the supermarket, because this wasn’t just about shopping but is also the scene of my ecological idiocy in 2019 when I uprooted a chunk of the plant which I subsequently discovered was the second of only two previous sightings. I’ve never shared the photos I took back in the van because I knew that the obvious question would be “why did you take this away to photograph it?” But I think I dare show one of them today because I found redemption on the car park wall! It’s not even a very good photograph – the lighting’s rubbish and it really doesn’t show enough of the key features, but that’s something you learn as you go along. Any way, if you scroll up to the top of this piece you’ll find what we found yesterday. That little solitary plant has now grown into the handsome stand we found yesterday. I could have done a celebratory jig but I lacked the nerve.

Rough Chervil seeds

Photographing plants is a skill that takes a while to develop and I’m only just getting a grip on it. The Catch 22 is that you never know what the important features are until you know what the plant is. As some wag once said – the keys in the floras are only any use if you already know what you’ve got. So not being an expert I just take lots of photos from different angles, using a macro lens to capture fine detail and using a small ruler to measure some of the parts that I know will be important. With the Carrot family, for instance, the exact shape and dimensions of the seeds are crucial to getting an ID. The payback is that the closer you look, the more intensely beautiful the seeds become. You could spend a lifetime making handbuilt pots based on them and you’d never run out of inspiration. This is the point where science and art overlap. Here, for example, are the seeds of Rough Chervil that I photographed this week on the campsite. These days all my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a phone with an add on macro lens that costs less than £50. It’s a joy not having to lug a huge bag of kit around and all my stuff for an excursion fits into a small shoulder bag.

As we walked down to the bus stop I also caught sight of what turned out (after a lot of head scratching) to be Black Spleenwort. I really wanted it to be Lanceolate Spleenwort which would be a first record, but my selfish desires were trumped by good science. With ferns you really need to look at the shapes but also in microscopic detail at the way the spores are carried at the back of the leaves. If you’re at all interested in ferns – and I think they’re addictive – the little green swellings called “indusia” contain the “sori” the almost microscopic bundles of spores called sporangia, and which contain the spores themselves – millions of them! Here’s a selection of photos I took near the bus stop. It’s not all about glamorous adventures in the jungle!

Potwell Inn – the return!

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Sadly our week in Cornwall is almost over. We’ve walked somewhere in the region of thirty miles, identified no end of new plants (to us) including one (subject to the opinion of the County Recorder) that isn’t on the vice-county list. I’ve slept with a bunch of Mugwort next to my nose, in pursuit of lucid dreams – I certainly slept well, but I would need to talk to my analyst about their lucidity.

We’ve found moths, butterflies and birds that we’d not seen before and I managed to keep the blog going without an internet connection at the price of my entire data allowance. Life is good then.

I mentioned the multi sensory nature of field botany previously, but didn’t really explain what I meant by it.

The visual is obviously top of the list because we normally see things before we do anything else. Colours draw our attention as does anything unusually tall.

But touch too is diagnostic- today I was distinguishing between three kinds of Cleavers – Goose Grass or whatever. Proper Cleavers has rough stalks whereas the other two didn’t. Of the others, one was white flowered and the other yellow flowered, so that’s probably Hedge Bedstraw and Lady’s Bedstraw respectively. Square stalks too can point you in the right direction.

Smell – well try Hedge Woundwort for starters. Hemlock has a ‘mousy’ smell, dill, fennel, Ground Ivy, Mint, Elderflower- and many more – all easily identifiable when you crush the leaves or flowers in your fingers and smell them.

Taste – well yes – I’ll often taste things as long as I’m quite sure they’re not poisonous. It’s not always pleasant but you can often place a plant in the right family by taste.

Finally there’s sound. Try Yellow Rattle, for instance. OK after that I’m a bit stumped for sound, but you get my point I hope, identifying plants means pressing all the senses into service.

Why is this important? Well it seems to me we’re in a race to preserve not just rare species but the ordinary everyday ones as well, and unless we can know and name them they’ll slip away and we’ll lose a great chunk of our culture. As Robert Macfarlane argues, if we lose the names, the words, the properties, we lose bits of ourselves and we are impoverished.

Who on earth would actually want to be the last person to see a Barn Owl flying silently, low along a hedge in the twilight? How could you teach Hopkins’ poem ‘Windhover’ to children who had never seen a kestrel? and how ‘Kes’ for that matter. How the novels of Henry Williamson – notwithstanding his abhorrent political views? How Ezra Pound to anyone who has never seen an olive tree (same reservations!).

How Elgar to someone who never heard a lark sing? Now I’m getting emotional!

The New Testament word for “daily bread” is untranslatable because it doesn’t occur anywhere else but I’d argue that ‘epiousios’ means more than bread, however San Francisco and right-on sourdough! Perhaps it means something more like the everyday, around and about us things that give us meaning, nourish us culturally not just by maintaining our body. The plants, the birds, fishes, animals and the weather sustain us in ways we can barely understand. That’s it! end of lecture and back up the M5 to see the allotment in the morning.